Last weekend (I mean the weekend of March 18-19) we saw a sign on a farm stand, and ads in the local paper, about Maine Maple Sunday, March 26. It turned out to be a bigger deal than we realized.
First of all, let me say that I was wrong two weeks ago when I said you don’t see metal sap buckets hanging on trees these days. It was just a little early in the sugaring season then, and those were the first we had seen. Last weekend and this weekend we saw many more. It’s true, commercial sugar makers use tubing collection systems. People who have a few trees that they tap still use buckets.
OK, with that out of the way, I’ll get started writing. I took so many pictures, and have so much to say, that I’ll split this into three posts. The second two have all the pictures. Be aware that they’re image-intensive, or will be when they’re written.
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We started — probably the earliest we’ve been out of the house on a Sunday — at a pancake breakfast at the Webb’s Mills Community Center. We parked in a big lot at the Webb’s Mills Variety store. A woman getting out of the car next to us said she thought it would be OK to park there, since the store wasn’t even open yet. Jim, the former owner of our house, was at a table in the entry room, waiting for his breakfast. We paid for our meals and sat down to talk and eat with him. The menu was juice, two pancakes and a sausage patty (with seconds if you asked) and coffee. Coffee was in the main room of the building, which had another eight or ten tables and a stage. Of course the main point was the real maple syrup, from Sweet William’s sugarhouse down the road. Jim asked if we were going to go from one pancake breakfast to another. We weren’t, but we did want to go to the open house at Sweet William’s.